Flood Plains by Mark Wheaton (best reads txt) 📗

After setting the hold-open to keep gas pumping into his tank, Big Time wandered into the station. As he entered, the owner was shouting obscenities at an emaciated young black man standing at the counter holding two half-gallon bottles of water.

“You fuckers gotta have four or five of my bathroom keys over in your crack squat,” the owner, a bearded, ponytailed, white fifty-something with the name “Edwin” stitched to his grimy shirt bellowed at the kid. “I know you sneak over here all hours of the day to use my facilities and I’m sick of it. I don’t care what you buy. Restrooms are off-limits. Next time I see one of you crackheads out there, I’m calling the police.”

The youngster stood glassy-eyed and took his dressing-down. When the owner finally went quiet, he nodded a sort of ‘good-bye’ and headed for the door. The owner turned an incredulous look at Big Time.

“Man, I don’t know what’s worse,” Edwin began. “The dopeheads or the fact that the City knew exactly what they were doing when they let all that trash come over in the first place.”

Big Time figured the guy had seen his Louisiana plates at least half a dozen times. Even now they were up on the rotating four-camera display alongside the register, but Big Time simply slid a twenty across the counter and said nothing.

“I used to know a mechanic, Romanian guy, who worked on German cars. He sold a lot of parts and won some trip to Germany, but when he came back, he was just shaking his head because of all the immigrants fucking up the country. I still remember he said, ‘If Hitler came back for just one week, place would be paradise.’ Funny guy, right?”

The owner waited for Big Time’s dirty look but got a grin instead. “You know Hitler killed all the Romanians, too, right? And your pal’s an immigrant, no? Sounds like he was plotting his own demise.”

The owner was struck dumb. Big Time gave him a little salute before heading back to his truck. Making a mental note to gas up at the Texaco up by Deltech from here on, Big Time hopped back behind the wheel and angled towards the highway.

Once up on the 59, he could see the dimly illuminated skyline of downtown. Unlike Dallas with its ball-topped Reunion Tower, Chicago with whatever they were now calling the Sears Tower, or Manhattan with the Empire State Building, Houston was downright anonymous. Even so, Big Time thought its cluster of modern skyscrapers looked like Oz when viewed against a foreground of the ramshackle, sub-poverty homes of Fifth Ward.

Chapter 2

Zakiyah Weldele sighed as she looked at the moving boxes in her living room, trying to remember how much bigger the place had appeared before Alan moved in. Sure, Katrina had wiped him out and his trademark good luck hadn’t followed him to Houston, but was that any reason to extend a hand to the man who’d knocked her up at fourteen and had played the absentee father to Mia ever since?

Her cell phone said it was already 5:43, three minutes past her absolute, already-gonna-be-late cut-off time.

“You tell your daddy he’d better have all this off the floor or in storage by the end of the week or it’s going in the dumpster,” Zakiyah said.

Mia looked up from her breakfast cereal and giggled. Zakiyah tried unsuccessfully to stifle a smile.

“It’s not funny! This place is a sty.”

Most of the boxes were clothes, mostly workout gear with multiple pairs of shoes. The tread had been worn down to almost nothing on some of them, but Alan kept them anyway. Then there were three full boxes of trophies.

Those goddamn trophies.

Zakiyah realized a couple of the plaques were ones she’d first seen in Alan’s bedroom over ten years ago. She’d thought it was really something to be this big handsome track star’s girlfriend at the time, especially since she’d never considered herself the prettiest girl in class. Now, the fact that this same fellow, now a grown man, was still carting around trinkets he’d won at a fifth-grade Field Day made her roll her eyes.

“Oink, oink,” Mia grunted, giving herself a pig nose with her index finger. She pretended to eat her cereal as if from a trough.

“That’s disgusting,” Zakiyah said. She walked over and kissed her daughter on the forehead. “I can’t be late, so tell Daddy to take the bus.”

Mia nodded. Zakiyah grabbed her packed lunch off the counter, pretending first to grab Mia’s faded pink plastic lunch bag.

“Mom!”

“Oh, sorry.”

Mia sighed and Zakiyah grinned.

“Do well today and make me proud.”

Once out the door, Zakiyah noticed that it was lightly raining. Quickly searching the parking lot for her faded blue Sentra, she spotted it only three spaces away from the front door. Deciding to take this as a good omen, she was soon on the road making up the time she’d lost.

•  •  •

Deltech Computers was created by four friends who had been laid off from their respective computer companies in the mid-eighties. Reagan had called in the small business loans, and demand for business computers crashed. As the story went, these fellows, who had gotten to know one another working booths across countless business conferences, met at a Luby’s Cafeteria in North Houston. Over iced tea and Jell-O, they designed a new kind of personal computer that would be cheap to manufacture, far lighter than anything on the market (making it cheaper to ship), but it would still include all the bells and whistles they knew their clients desired with none of the costly ones that tended to go unused for the life of the machine.

Fifteen years later, they had leapt past several competitors to compete with the likes of IBM and Packard Bell to become one of the largest providers of business computers in the world. Their manufacturing, service, and administrative departments employed over thirty-five thousand people worldwide. Around eighteen thousand of these worked at the main Deltech campus